Before RiiTag, there was 4 different gamertags made for the Wii. The idea was to make something like gamertags for the PlayStation and Xbox, where you could just insert them into a forum signature or website and show what you've been playing, achievements you've earned, etc.
The first gamertag for the Wii was called Ncard, made by Minus_273 and chris, released in approximately late April 2010. It worked by running a homebrew app that synced with the games that you've been playing on the Wii Message Board. We never used it, but we think it was probably pretty basic. However, at some point, the whole project went down.
The next gamertag created was Wiinnertag by Brazilian developer daileon, and it came out in late August 2010. It was the first to support USB Loaders, was more configurable, and it also used GameTDB to display the game covers that show up on your tag. However, the domain expired in around August 2015, and the site never came back up again.
While Wiinnertag existed, ShadowPuppet, who owned the forum known as DarkUmbra, created DUTag in December 2010. They didn't intend to "steal Wiinnertag's thunder", but further advanced the concept of a Wii gamertag. It was more customizable, introducing features like a coin counter to show how many games you're playing, Twitter/Facebook integration, more customizable backgrounds, and more. It also used GameTDB to get covers. In September 2015, the forum was upgraded and included a DUTag revamp. The new configuration panel for it was unfinished so no one could register a tag anymore, and years went by without it working. DarkUmbra shut down in February 2020 without notice, and it was actually because Nintendo's lawyers forced it to go down for, to put it bluntly, a piracy site to get Nintendo games. DUTag went down permanently with it.
There was another gamertag in development that most people don't know about, because it was never actually released. Lustar, the admin of GameTDB, started working on his own gamertag for the site in October 2011. We don't think it had all the features of DUTag, because Lustar showed us some concepts and it looked more simple. By the way, we have strong affiliation with GameTDB. Again, the GameTDB gamertag never released.
Fast forward to around May 2019, when none of the gamertags worked anymore (DUTag was still up at the time, but it was not really much of any use anymore). We really missed the idea of the Wii gamertag. After getting no response about reviving Wiinnertag, and DUTag and GameTDB's tag not being worked on due to a lack of time, we at RiiConnect24 decided that we would make our own gamertag. Lustar suggested it be called "RiiTag". A developer known as bendevnull volunteered to start working on it. The tag rendering engine was complete in days, but it took about 9 months to finish because of off-and-on work on creating a website for it (bendevnull hated web development). RiiTag was released in March 2020.
The work paid off. We hate to brag, but we think we have created the best, most advanced, and most beautiful Wii gamertag ever made. We included many features that none of the other tags ever had, such as Wii U and Dolphin integration, the ability to add Wii U/3DS games to the tag, Mii/avatar support, choice between multiple fonts, making the tag larger, and more. We hope you enjoy using RiiTag.